So much political news over the past four years has been astonishing: Joe Biden’s disintegration on a debate stage, Donald Trump’s return to power, the possible U.S. annexation of Canada. But New York Mayor Eric Adams’s MAGA turn, by contrast, seems completely predictable.
Since the election, Adams has lunched with Trump and his son at the Trump International Golf Club in Florida. On Monday, he accepted “on behalf of New York City” what his spokesperson described as a last-minute invitation to the inauguration. And Tuesday, he sat down with the house media organ of MAGA, Tucker Carlson, for an interview.
“People often say ‘You don’t sound like a Democrat,’ and ‘You seem to have left the party,’” Adams told Carlson. “No, the party left me.”
This is a man who less than four years ago described himself as “the future of the Democratic Party.” Finding a reason for the abrupt shift isn’t all that hard, and it doesn’t involve any changes in the Democratic Party. It involves the multiple felony charges against Adams, and the pardon power that Trump has now regained. Trump said before his inauguration that he would consider pardoning Adams.
The mayor was charged in September, in an indictment that alleged florid corruption, including bribery, campaign-finance violations, and elaborately constructed travel itineraries through Istanbul (the New York City of Turkey, if you will). Adams has denied any wrongdoing, in the emphatic way only he can. So many top officials in his administration have been raided, indicted, or forced to step down that New York magazine could barely fit them all on a cover; by the time the issue hit stands, it was already out of date. Things are so bad that polls suggest he could lose reelection to Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor with his own long record of alleged misconduct, though he, too, has denied wrongdoing.
Adams is not the first Democratic politician to discover a strange new respect for Donald Trump. Rod Blagojevich followed the well-trod path from the Illinois governor’s mansion to prison, then pioneered the playbook Adams appears to be employing, culminating in a 2020 pardon.
“My fellow Democrats have not been very kind to him,” the former governor said of Trump afterward. “In fact, they’ve been very unkind to him.” He even coined a useful term: “If you’re asking me what my party affiliation is, I’m a Trumpocrat.”
Other politicians have turned Trumpocrat, or at least Trumpocrat-curious. When former Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, was indicted for corruption, he echoed Trump in claiming that shadowy forces were out to get him because of his politics. Never mind that Menendez was indicted by the Biden Justice Department. He’d previously been charged by the Obama Justice Department, but he beat that rap; this time he was convicted, despite his best efforts to blame his wife. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat indicted for bribery last year, has also gone out of his way to signal openness to working with Trump. (Cuellar denies wrongdoing.) Trump appears receptive; after the indictment, he claimed on Truth Social that Cuellar was being punished for being tough on the border.
But Adams and Trump share more than felony charges and a love of New York City nightlife. Seldom have two politicians seemed so destined for alliance. Both men are masters of personality politics—naturally charismatic but also perversely watchable because of the likelihood that they’re going to blunder and cause a huge blowup. They’re also big-picture thinkers, able to tap into emotionally freighted topics—especially crime—with grand gestures, but less skilled and less interested in minutiae, leaving that to lieutenants.
Not coincidentally, both have also been Democrats and Republicans at different times in their careers. Conforming to a platform is less important to them than rallying voters around a feeling. Moreover, they are both nakedly transactional—in Adams’s case, according to federal prosecutors, to a criminal degree; in Trump’s case, his attempt to exchange aid to Ukraine for an investigation into Hunter Biden was enough to get him impeached. They share a sense that they are perpetually being persecuted by the establishment, even as one is the mayor of the nation’s largest city and the other is starting his second term as president.
The possible benefits for Adams—a pardon—of cultivating Trump are clear enough. What does Trump get out of it? One can imagine a few possibilities. The first is that Trump is a New York real-estate developer, and it’s never a bad idea to be on the right side of city hall. He surely noticed that, according to prosecutors, the bribes paid to Adams helped get quick inspection approval for a building in Manhattan. Trump also remains obsessed with the idea of success and belonging in New York, even as he lives elsewhere—another thing he might share with Adams.
Politically, Trump has been working to make inroads with Black voters in blue cities and states, and Black voters open to a more conservative vision happen to be Adams’s core constituency. By embracing Adams, just as he did Cuellar, Trump is also hoping to bolster his claims of being a target of political prosecution: He contends that their indictments show how the “deep state” goes after its enemies. This doesn’t make much sense—Adams and Cuellar are both Democrats indicted by federal prosecutors in a Democratic presidential administration—but coherence has never been all that important to Trump.
Of course, all of this might be overthinking the situation. The attraction between Trump and Adams may be as simple as the two men seeing a lot of themselves in the other—game recognizing game.
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Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was born in Rome around the year 475 C.E. A learned man, he served his nation faithfully as a senator and consul. But the early sixth century was a period of perilous political instability, and Boethius was wrongly accused of treason by Ostrogoth King Theodoric. Imprisoned and sentenced to death, Boethius kept a prison diary chronicling his despair and inability to understand how such an unjust fate could make sense in a well-ordered universe.
Then help came—in the form, as Boethius tells it, of a mysterious and divine visitor to his cell: Lady Philosophy. A being of superhuman dignity and beauty, she engages Boethius in a series of philosophical discourses that raise his consciousness to a better perception of the true nature of good and the vanity of his misery. So morally elevated by his new understanding of philosophy, he could face his predicament—including his ultimate execution—with courage, peace, even joy.
What Boethius described was no symptom of carceral derangement; the lady was his metaphor for the power of philosophy to breathe life back into a deadened soul. With luck, you are not reading this column from prison; no doubt, however, you still have plenty of problems you would like to solve. Perhaps you need to invite Lady Philosophy into your own life. Here’s how.
We all know that, in general, studying and learning improve quality of life. Indeed, adopting a lifelong learning habit is one of the practices that leads to being happy and healthy in old age. And those who study philosophy enjoy particular benefits. In a large-sample 2024 survey of more than 100,000 individuals over their college years, the scholars Michael Prinzing and Michael Vazquez compared undergraduates of philosophy with peers studying other fields and found that the budding philosophers showed more enhanced “habits of mind” (curiosity, intellectual rigor, humility) and “pluralistic orientation” (tolerance, open-mindedness) than the students of other subjects. (In case you’re wondering, business majors scored the most poorly in habits of mind, and students of agriculture manifested the least pluralistic orientation.)
Neuroscientists have taken an interest in the cognitive benefits of philosophy. One theory offered by Georg Northoff in his book Neuro-Philosophy and the Healthy Mind is that we become more cognitively flexible—finding it easier to accept and employ alternative ways of thinking—when presented with different philosophical frameworks. This, in turn, improves the connection between the default mode network (which is central to self-reflection and pondering life’s meaning) and the brain’s executive network. In short, wrestling with philosophical questions makes your brain work better.
Engaging with a variety of philosophies is not the same as applying a particular one to your life. If you’re going to adopt a specific philosophical approach, some seem clearly more likely to be beneficial than others. For example, it’s hard to imagine that becoming a full-blown existential nihilist—life is meaningless and then you die—will aid much in your happiness. (You might think that posing as one, with a Gauloise cigarette in hand, might make you look more fascinating, but neither of those things is very good for your well-being.)
Evidence suggests that people who strongly embrace hedonism as a philosophy of life—the classical version of this is known as epicureanism—tend to be unhappier than people who don’t or do so moderately. In contrast, Stoicism—which focuses on the concept of a good life based on inner strength in the face of problems—is quite beneficial as a worldview: Researchers reported in 2022 that when two dozen medical students received psychotherapy that used the principles of Stoic philosophy, they became more empathic and resilient.
Certain attitudes and experiences predict which philosophy one will find most congenial. For example, researchers have shown that people who use recreational drugs are more likely than others to believe that morality is subjective; people who have had a transcendental experience are most likely to believe in God. Meanwhile, hard determinists (who believe that free will is an illusion and that all events are beyond our individual control) tend to register lower in well-being and higher in mental illness.
Whether or not you decide to fully adopt a particular philosophy, simply studying different ones is good for both your intellectual prowess and your humility. Such study is also good for society insofar as it can make people less rigid and dogmatic in their beliefs. In my case, I am trained as a behavioral scientist and was educated with very little philosophy. But that changed about five years ago, after I saw evidence in research about philosophical education of its personal and social benefits. So I took to studying the great thinkers myself, from Aristotle to Zeno—and contemporary philosophers as well. Here are the rules I’ve followed for doing so.
1. Start with a lay of the land.
Rather than beginning at a random point, create your own version of an undergraduate survey course. There are many wonderful books that give you a broad sweep of philosophy, such as Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy. For a classic that is slightly denser and more demanding, try Will Durant’s 1926 work, The Story of Philosophy. Or buy an introductory textbook and do your own Philosophy 101.
2. Take big ideas in small doses.
As you turn to the original texts, you’ll find that they’re not binge-reading material. You won’t get much from the NicomacheanEthics if you try to read it over a weekend. Like most philosophical texts, Aristotle’s seminal work requires keen attention and a lot of thought. Set a time aside each day to read for 10 to 15 minutes, taking notes as you go. This will become a treasured habit and get you through a lot of deep thought in a satisfying way as the months pass.
3. Do rely on teachers.
If you didn’t need secondary sources and annotated versions of the works of philosophy, that would be great. But I do and so, probably, will you. Right now, I am struggling with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. All I can say is, thank God others got their doctorates in this stuff and can machete through this intellectual thicket with their commentary.
4. This really is what YouTube is for.
When you decide to scroll videos to pass the time, whether at night in bed or on the treadmill at the gym, do you come away feeling empty and slightly depressed because you just blew an hour of watching utterly vacuous stuff? Don’t rely on the junk that the algorithm feeds you; search for videos made by scholars talking about their favorite philosophers. The quality is mixed, but your time will rarely be wasted.
5. Try applying what you learn.
If you really want to achieve a bone-deep understanding of a philosophical idea, try living according to its prescription for a few days, or a week, if you can. I remember being profoundly affected by Immanuel Kant’s claim that “By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man” in his 1797 treatise, The Metaphysics of Morals. Yes! cried my soul. So I tried living with his brand of radical honesty for a week. The experience was valuable, but I learned that I am not a Kantian—because I actually like being married and employed.
My little autodidact’s routine for learning some philosophy is no substitute for a formal education, and I realize that I am still hopelessly ignorant and capable of gross errors. I know this because professional philosophers are never shy about pointing out my missteps among the correspondence I receive for these columns.
Still, my visits from Lady Philosophy have made an immense positive difference in the perspective I have on life. This pursuit of the mind is endlessly fascinating and—I would say, borrowing from the title of Boethius’s prison diary—even consoling. In The Consolation of Philosophy, he summarized what the lady had taught him about how to practice the good life as: “Withstand vice, practice virtue, lift up your souls to right hopes, offer humble prayers to Heaven.” As valuable advice today as it was in 524.
As Myanmar’s civil war heads into a fifth year, anti-junta forces are opening universities and colleges as part of their pursuit of a federal democracy.
On Monday, in one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump defrocked 50 high priests of U.S. national security. Now deprived of their clearances, if they want to know what’s happening in the world, they are reduced, like the rest of us, to reading the newspaper, and waiting for the president to blurt out nuclear codes over brunch at Mar-a-Lago. Once out of government, these former officials usually keep their clearances so they can return to government, or to civilian contracting work that involves government secrets, without friction, and so they can learn secrets and give advice informally. Removing these clearances is petty and personal. But it is Trump’s decision to make, and in a week of wacky and unexpected executive orders, it is one of the easier to defend.
The order singled out former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton for special dishonor. Trump accused Bolton of making money by publishing a memoir “for monetary gain” before the intelligence community could scrub his text of classified material. In a separate and remarkably spiteful action, Trump called off government security details for Bolton, former Trump State department official Brian Hook, and former Secretary of State and CIA director, Michael Pompeo. The FBI has accused Iran of trying to kill all three men. Trump often expresses his distaste for those who tried to give direction and discipline to his first term. It is nonetheless shocking to see him come to power and, as one of his first acts, ensure that if Iranian assassins wish to take out his former advisers, they’ll soon have a cleaner shot. Americans who work in national security assume that the government will protect them against vengeance from terrorists, no matter what. They now have reason to believe that this protection is a conditional perk, like a nice parking space, that can be taken away for talking smack on CNN.
Bolton bemoans the removal of his protection detail. Because he is not a dummy or a hypocrite, however, he has not questioned Trump’s ability to take away his clearance. A clearance, unlike the ability to live without fear of assassination, really is the president’s to grant or withdraw at will. The first conversation I ever had with Bolton (whom I profiled for this magazine in 2019) was 18 years ago, about the awesome power of the president to classify, declassify, and determine who can read classified material. This power is almost without limit, Bolton said. (The president cannot declassify certain information about nuclear weapons. Other than that, the power is his.) The president then was George W. Bush, and Bolton, fresh from service as Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, vigorously defended the expansiveness of his old boss’s powers.
Trump is miffed at Bolton for going on cable news to call Trump an idiot. The suggestion that Bolton’s memoir is, as Trump claims, “rife with sensitive information” is both hypocritical, given Trump’s own irresponsible information-security practices, and hard to believe, given the fact that in the four years since it was published, no one has suggested that any specific revelations have compromised national security. The real victim was Trump’s ego. Bolton did, however, publish before getting permission to do so, and anyone who has had a security clearance knows that dodging the review is a violation not just of the letter of one’s clearance conditions but also of the norms and instincts inculcated by the culture of national security. If Bolton expected to keep his clearance after that, then maybe he is a dummy after all.
The other 49 laicized national-security officials had signed an open letter (always a bad idea) that declared in 2020, right before the presidential election, that the now mostly confirmed story of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” A computer technician in Delaware said that Hunter had dropped off the laptop for repair at his computer shop in 2019. Hunter never retrieved it. It contained images of him in states of undress, apparently doped up, and in acts of sexual congress. The contents were so sleazy that even if the laptop were a Russian hoax, which it was not, the hard drives should have been power-washed, submerged in isopropyl alcohol, and thrown into an active volcano purely as a sanitary measure. The former president’s son also appeared in emails to be seeking to profit off his father’s office. The evidence for corruption never amounted to enough for a charge to stick. But because no one could figure out any other reason a Ukrainian oil company would want Hunter on their board, the suggestion of influence peddling seemed plausible.
The intelligence professionals who signed the letter (which was drafted by former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell) warned readers that they did not know whether the laptop’s contents were “genuine or not,” and said they had no “evidence of Russian involvement,” only suspicions. The signatories included former directors of the NSA, CIA, and the Office of National Intelligence, and many others with long and distinguished service to the United States. These figures provided intelligence and analysis to presidents, generals, congressmen, and others. The core of their job—the reason anyone listens to them—is devotion to an almost priestly ethos of analytical rigor. They speak only after marshaling all available resources to find all the facts that can be known; they deliver briefings based on everything they know—not just the facts they like—and without political tilt or opinion. The public never gets classified briefings. Those who have clearance to get them are meant to be confident that when the briefers speak, they speak with authority, clarity, and dispassion. The experience should be like listening to a great trial lawyer. You should wonder why anyone would bother disagreeing.
Why these titans of intelligence were willing to risk their hard-won credibility on the possibility that Hunter Biden might not be a slimeball is deeply mysterious. Even considering their caveats, somehow they signed and published their letter without due diligence and without the slightest consideration that Hunter was, in fact, prone to shady behavior. No doubt they felt that the laptop story was urgent, because it could affect the election in a few weeks. But their job was to seek facts and judge them with restraint. In this case, minimal fact-seeking would entail asking the Bidens if the sordid laptop was real, and restraint would entail not venturing wild accusations. The letter does not suggest that the authors asked the Bidens—although they certainly could have, since (according to a 2023 House Intelligence report) the letter originated with a call to them from Antony Blinken, then a Biden-campaign official and later secretary of state. Did the Biden team lie about the laptop, or claim Hunter had no memory of it? Or did the authors never even bother to inquire if it belonged to Hunter? In either case, the letter exhibited extremely shoddy analytic craftsmanship. Some signers of the letter had access to classified briefings, and could have asked their old colleagues in the intelligence community whether the laptop was a Russian hoax. In 2023, House investigators asked James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence and one of the drafters of the letter, why he did not ask for a briefing. “Because I didn’t want to be tainted by access to classified information,” he told them.
That won’t be a problem anymore. Because they were excessively generous to one candidate over the other, the letter signers left the impression that they were on the Democratic team—and, moreover, that they would lower their standards in order to influence an American election. Connoisseurs of irony will note that the CIA has, historically, had few scruples about influencing foreign elections, and will ask why they would hesitate to influence an American one. But to influence even a foreign election takes approval from the White House, and to influence a domestic one is flagrantly illegal. Like Bolton, these signers should have known that they were violating a deeply ingrained taboo. If they did not know that Trump, a man too petty and unrestrained to realize that vindictiveness is a sign of weakness, would punish them as soon as he could, then they, too, are not as intelligent as I thought.
This article originally stated that Trump had removed Secret Service protection for three former government officials. In fact, two of them had been receiving protection from the State Department.
